Brick Mountains

Babel: Man’s challenge to the heavens, the innate desire to go towards the sky, the idea that the conquest of peaks signifies power, the knowledge that from above, things looks different. First with towers, and later with skyscrapers, what pushes Man to “build mountains” is dictated not only by the need to protect himself, and defend himself, and to exploit height since he is forced to live in very small spaces, but rather by an instinct for heights, much like that of a child who will not rest until he succeeds in climbing up a mass of stone that rises from a meadow. If someone once defined mountaineers as conquerors of the useless, our era is the example of the useless challenge to conquer the heights.

This is the idea behind the short film, Babel, by Hendrick Dusollier, where those who lose themselves in the thick of the skyscrapers of Shanghai are people who have left the Celestial Mountains to search elsewhere, in an artificial world, for the mountain they hope to be able to leave. At times, a film is so suggestive that it moves us to think deeply. It was this film that gave us the idea for a comparison between the mountains in nature and those made of bricks. And immediately the famous fade from the pinnacles of the Dolomites to the skyscrapers of New York in Luis Trenker’s 1934 masterpiece, The Prodigal Son, came to mind. The festival will screen this classic film in the Italian-language version. Once again, we have a story of emigrants who leave the high plains in search of other heights, and of a place where life can be lived from other points of view. Whoever leaves the mountains will carry this burden forever, and will find it hard not to come back. So it has been for the emigrants of yesterday and today.

The mountains are a completely different story in that great work of silent film, Safety Last, in which the timeless and unmistakable character created by Harold Lloyd climbs a mountain in his own way. His is a triple challenge: to earn money, escape from those who are chasing him, and save his own skin. Here the mountain be- comes a fantastic metaphor for a life of tribulation. What unites all of these mountains is, perhaps, fatigue. And not always after the climb is there a descent.